Remote, network-accessible entities offer a wide variety of electronic content and services to a variety of different devices, including personal computers (PCs), electronic book viewers, portable digital assistants (PDAs), mobile telephones, pocket PCs, smart phones, televisions, set-top boxes, digital video recorders (DVRs), and gaming consoles, among others. These devices often access various remotely-accessible resources, such as various web pages and web services. Such resources may be, for example, associated with online stores, or other providers of audio/visual content, software programs, digital books, or other electronic content.
Today, providers of these resources sometimes require that users authenticate themselves in order to access particular resources. For example, web pages may include information associated with billing data, purchase histories, personal information, or stored content that can be protected using these techniques. Likewise, in addition to protecting content, it may be desirable to protect against unauthorized use of various web services, particularly when the use of such services are charged on a pay-per-use basis. While such remotely-accessible resources may employ authentication schemes to reduce unauthorized access, hackers and other malicious parties sometimes identify and exploit the inherent weaknesses of existing authentication schemes to obtain access to secured consumer information. Therefore, systems and methods are needed to overcome the limitations of traditional processes that authenticate users.